You don’t need to get sick to “exercise” your immune system. It’s really quite fine to avoid virus infection!
Dr. Lisa Iannattone, adjunct clinical professor at McGill University of Medicine, explains: The hygiene hypothesis is they misnomer that just won’t die. We don’t need to be sick to be well.
Here’s a TLDR attempted summary on my part.
- The “biodiversity hypothesis” is that idea that allergies/immune disease is related to the loss of contact with biodiverse environments (also known as “nature”).
- We have millions of microbes on our skin and in our gut that interact with our immune system.
- A more diverse microbiome is associated with a lower risk of immune system disorders.
- Living in cities, hygiene, antibiotics, etc. is thought to make our microbiome less diverse.
- Studies have been done on this, such as one in which kids that “played in the dirt” for 28 days had improved skin bacteria, which then seemed to improve their immune system.
- But playing in the dirt is not the same thing as getting sick with a virus. This is a misinterpretation of the hypothesis.
- “Measles and many respiratory diseases proved not to be protective against allergic disease, and, in many cases, even increased the risk.”
Basically, you do want exposure to beneficial bacteria (probably; it’s still a hypothesis).
But you do not want exposure to noxious viruses, like Covid (or the flu, or even a common cold). There is no evidence, anywhere, that such exposure is good for your immune system; indeed, it can be quite the opposite.
Global News recently had a good article about this as well: “Immunity debt’: Why experts say this new term promotes COVID-19 misinformation. In it, they quote (among others) Dr. Colin Furness, an infection control epidemiologist, who says that it’s wrong to think of your immune system as a muscle that atrophies with lack of use. It’s more like a collection of photographs. They might fade with time (age) but never from lack of use (because you don’t look at them).
“In children and in young, healthy people, there is absolutely no mechanism by which your immunity weakens on its own,” Furness said.
“In other words, you don’t have to keep getting sick in order to be healthy. It makes no sense at all in any way, shape or form — when we encounter a pathogen and we form an immune response to it, that is a lifelong memory, no question.”
Dr. Colin Furness to Teresa Wight, Global News
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